Categories

about.me

"This one, says he wants to sell you rockets..."

I'm just a storyteller who's lucky enough to get to tell some really awesome stories. My first book was co-authored with a couple of astronauts, and my day job involves sharing about America's next great rocket. In my spare time, I force people to be funny and I dress up to talk about history.

So I saw in the newspaper last Sunday that Best Buy was running a sale on the awesome Jeff Bridges country music movie Crazy Hearton Blu-Ray. Now, I don’t necessarily want to watch it right now, but it’s definitely a movie I could see myself wanting to watch and/or inflict on others in the future. So there’s some temptation to go ahead and buy it now to have when that day comes.

The problem with that is this that I’m beginning to fear that I made a mistake. I watched the format wars between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD with great interest, planning to upgrade from DVDs the moment there was a clear winner. By Christmas two years ago, it was obvious Blu-Ray had one, and I got a Blu-Ray player.

I wanted to switch as early as possible because I buy a decent number of movies, and didn’t want to keep investing in DVDs, which at that point were clearly an obsolete format. But now I’m wondering if I’ve done the thing I was trying to avoid doing. I was so focused on which format was going to come out on top that I never stopped to consider that the issue of which physical medium would win was beside the point.

Online digital streaming and downloads are becoming increasingly common. To be honest, even after investing in Blu-Ray, I probably watch more television shows that I download from iTunes than I do movies that I buy on disc. And it sounds like Apple is about to take things further with Apple TV (iTV?) soon, which could further the balance.

So, yeah, if I buy Crazy Heart on Blu-Ray this week, am I doing exactly what I tried to avoid doing with DVD two years ago? By the time I want to watch it, will I be wondering why I was still investing in physical media in late 2010?